Slightly Askew

The ability to blockquote is only the touch of a button away in Wordpress, so it’s easy to add visual emphasis when I’m quoting someone.

It’s a town for losers, but I’m pulling outta here to win.

But when using my better-half’s laptop - that’s still making use of the wonderfully archaic Internet Explorer 6 (or IE6 if you’re up with web slang) - I noticed that text underneath a blockquote was shifting to the left slightly. And then after the next blockquote it would shift even further to the left. And so on. Not good.

Oddly, I’ve managed to solve the problem by adding a simple border to the offending blockquotes. I’ve no idea why this works, but it does.

Usually, I’d never take this approach. I need to the exact cause of the problem in order to understand why the solution works.

But I’m getting older. IE6 is getting older too. Hopefully it will be extinct before me.

The moral of this story: pick your battles.

Anybody who has used Wordpress and tried to embed a Youtube video will have suffered the frustration of code getting stripped whenever you edit a post.  Enter EasyTube -  a wonderful YouTube plugin for Wordpress.

Now, without any hassle whatsoever, I can post YouTube videos into Wordpress.

Here’s a video by Theresa Andersson.  The song makes you feel ill halfway through the second listen, but it’s a clever live performance.  Quite why she set up all her equipment in her kitchen baffles me.  It’s probably because that’s where her muse was or something (she does, after all, play barefoot, like any respectably self-indulgent singer songwriter).

Anyway, here it is:

I’ll be honest, I never got RSS feeds.

I’m no idiot when it comes to computers, but I’d ignore that little orange box with the pulse-wave-type-design at every opportunity.

But like Sky+ (well, probably - I don’t have it, but I’m told it’s great), once you get it, you can’t really live without it.

Well, okay, you could live without it.  It’s not like vitamins or Bruce Springsteen.

Google - unsurprisingly - is the source of my new found love for RSS.  Their Google Reader (good name) allows you to read all your favourite blogs from your iGoogle homepage.  To be fair, that’s probably what most RSS Readers do - but Google’s was dead-simple to set-up.

So in love I now am with RSS (and technologically fearless), I’ve set up my own feed.  So now, you can easily add this wonderful blog to popular feed readers by clicking that icon at the top of the left-hand menu.

If you’re scared, don’t be.  Look that little orange box straight in the eye and tell yourself “if I can put up with Rhianna’s godawful music, I can do anything.”